How M.M. Reduced the PTCL Contact Center’s AHT by 25% in 6 Months
Key metrics
- ~240,000 transactions
- 67% reduction in clicks
- 91% reduction in workload
- 81% error reduction
- ~800,000 mins saved
- ~25% reduction of AHT (avg of all processes automated)
About PTCL
The Pakistan Telecommunication Company Ltd. (PTCL) is a leading telecommunications provider in Pakistan and a subsidiary of e&, a global technology group. PTCL and its subsidiaries boast around 70 million subscribers collectively, making the national carrier central to the country’s telecommunications infrastructure.
PTCL’s vision and the role of contact center automation
PTCL’s core objective was to improve its contact center efficiency. Achieving this goal invites several secondary benefits, including enhanced customer experiences, greater agent productivity, and cost reduction.
The challenges that PTCL had to overcome are not unique to its contact center; they are, in fact, common in customer care departments globally. McKinsey’s State of Customer Care report confirmed that these challenges plague the industry:
- High case volumes. Call center agents globally are struggling to keep up with the sheer volume of cases. Consequently, customers face frustratingly long wait times while agents experience heightened stress.
- Employee attrition. Statistics reveal that contact centers continue to suffer from high employee attrition in customer service. Call center attrition is costly for several reasons, chief of which are direct hiring costs, upfront training, and productivity losses during the ramp-up period.
- More complex interactions. An increase in the complexity of interactions alongside rising case volumes means service agents are struggling to deliver consistent, stellar experiences. Each agent is tasked with not only understanding the customer’s query and providing a resolution, but navigating different systems and retrieving relevant data required to provide such resolutions.
- Human error. Human error in the contact center adversely affects customer experiences and also leads to monetary losses.
PTCL soon realized that intelligent automation was pivotal in overcoming these challenges and achieving its core objectives. This realization was accompanied by the need to select the right technology and find the right implementation partner.
Choosing the right intelligent automation systems integrator
The nature of PTCL’s project meant that the enterprise sought a very specific type of partner; one that not only had experience in deploying intelligent automation, but also understood the intricacies of contact center processes, customer service delivery in telecommunications, and the challenges human agents faced in their day-to-day workflows.
These requirements led PTCL to choose M.M. as its partner for implementing intelligent automation in the contact center. For over two decades, M.M. has supported enterprises in their digital transformation, with a particular focus on the telecommunications, banking, and financial services sectors. M.M.’s team is also comprised of telecommunication industry experts with decades of experience in enhancing service delivery in the industry.
M.M.’s experience in both the intelligent automation and telecommunications spaces made them a natural choice for PTCL. We helped the telco achieve major efficiency gains in the contact centre; average handling times are down, service delivery has improved, and human agents are happier.
Automating the PTCL contact center
PTCL approached M.M. with key processes in the contact center to automate. These processes can be split into two broad categories of customer service requests: challenges with existing services and requests to avail new services. A third category of use cases focused on enhancing agent’s workflows, such as by automating data retrieval and complex tasks across different systems.
M.M. adopted a segmented approach to automating these processes that aligned with PTCL’s broader goals for improving contact center efficiency. This meant dissecting use cases to enable:
- Zero-touch experiences. Successfully delivering “zero-touch experiences” is a strategic priority for telcos globally, with automation being a key enabler. M.M. identified which processes could be automated from end-to-end to enhance service delivery.
An increase in zero-touch experiences reduces the number of case volumes that human agents must be engaged in, alleviating pressure from otherwise overburdened contact centers. Consequently, zero-touch allows customers to receive quicker resolutions for simpler queries, while it frees agents to focus on more complex ones.
- Agents to deliver superior experiences. While intelligent automation can successfully automate some processes from end to end, key service interactions still require human agents.
Intelligent automation can, however, enhance these service interactions as well by empowering human agents—such as by automating data retrieval or running pre-checks and verifications. Consequently, PTCL’s contact center observed an increase in agent productivity.
- Faster agent onboarding and enhanced agent experiences. Contact center attrition remains a global challenge which even leading enterprises haven’t managed to evade.
Intelligent automation helps reduce attrition by enhancing the agent’s front-end experience. Moreover, reducing upfront training times with automation allows enterprises to save on associated costs. M.M.’s intelligent automation deployments enabled PTCL to rapidly reduce agent onboarding times from several weeks to a few days.
M.M. implemented PTCL’s selected use cases in various stages across six months. Use cases were prioritized based on various factors, including transaction volumes, complexity, the approximate time to automate a given process, and perceived business value (such as error reduction or reducing average handling times).
Measuring impact
PTCL’s commitment to continuously enhancing customer experiences and improving efficiency meant the telco was particularly interested in how contact center automation:
- Helped their agents perform better. PTCL prioritized use cases that would simplify agent workflows and equip them to better serve customers. As such, PTCL aimed to measure the impact of automation on their workloads.
M.M.’s deployments in PTCL’s contact center reduced agent workloads by 91%. It also reduced clicks by 67%, confirming that agents spent less time retrieving data and navigating different systems thanks to intelligent automation.
- Improved service delivery. Another priority for the national telco was ensuring that its customers directly benefited from automation. PTCL’s contact center observed a 25% reduction in average handling time (AHT) across all automated processes.
- Enhanced operational efficiency. The contact center saved 800,000 minutes in 240,000 transactions performed across its automated processes. Errors were also reduced in the contact center by 81%.
- Helped the department combat attrition. Simplifying agent workflows and reducing their workload helped PTCL directly reduce agent attrition.
Additionally, leveraging intelligent automation to reduce onboarding times – from several weeks to a few days — helped PTCL reduce the “cost” of attrition. Faster, more streamlined onboarding times means PTCL can quickly bring new agents up to speed.
Deploying intelligent automation in the contact center itself also lowered the technical skill barrier for employees. In other words, service agents require less technical training on different systems, simplifying the onboarding process directly.
What’s next for PTCL?
The success of M.M.’s six-month intelligent automation project in PTCL’s contact center has motivated the national telco to extend our partnership and invest in further enhancing contact center efficiency and service delivery. M.M. and PTCL are planning the next phase of contact center automation with new, high-impact use cases.
With M.M.’s expertise, PTCL is exploring new ways to multiply the gains they’ve observed. Some questions we’re helping the MNO answer through intelligent automation include: What’s the best way to further reduce average handling times? Is there scope for further error reduction? Where can we enhance our customer’s and agent’s experiences?